After taking an Ancestry DNA test, I was shown some obvious inheritances such as Italian (mostly Central Southwestern), Japanese, and European/Ashkenazi Jew (I am aware of specifically German and Polish Jew ancestry). I also have traces of English, Welsh, and Scottish DNA (6-10%). The smallest fractions of DNA I have are of Cyprian, Greek/Albanian, and Egyptian origin. Based on historical migration/immigration (apologies if I’m using incorrect terminology), is it most likely that these traces come from my Italian ancestors?
Also, where could I learn about the migrations of people over time? I attempted to look on Wikipedia but the articles I read went right over my head, leaning very heavily into complicated genetic jargon that I’m not knowledgeable enough to understand.
If this is better suited for r/Genealogy, please let me know!
Italians are born in Italy from the amalgamation of pre-existing peoples, none of which could truly be called "Italian".
Where did these peoples come from? Apart from secondary influences such as the various armies that settled in different parts of the peninsula from the end of the Western Roman Empire (at most a few tens of thousands of people out of a total population of millions of people), the bulk of the population of Roman Italy was made up of "Italics" in the center-south and in the north-east, an Indo-European population that arrived between the second and the first millennium BC and split into various local ethnic groups such as the Venetics, the Samnites and the most famous Latins, who will found Rome . Subsequently, the Celts settled in the north-west, always Indo-European but coming from France. On the southern coasts, many Greeks also settled in colonies founded by the cities of the motherland.
However, there were still several pre-existing non-Indo-European populations (or it would be better to say languages) such as the Ligurians and above all the Etruscans in present-day Tuscany and in the lower course of the Po river.
All of them became Romans over the centuries of the republic and the empire and then during the Lombard reign a sense of Italian cultural identity began to be created, autonomous from the rest of the Roman world, which in that historical period was now linked to the eastern Mediterranean.